Liberty Theater

This site has some photos of the Liberty and information about the organ.

Here is a circa 1946 photo.

The PSTOS page about the Liberty Theatre appears to contain errors and certainly omits some early information about the house. The organization itself has another web page with two vintage postcard views of the Liberty when it was the the Orpheum Theatre, clearly identifiable as the same building in the 1946 photo of the Liberty linked by Lost Memory immediately above this comment.

I don't know where PSTOS got the information that the theater had been built in 1916 for T&D, but that circuit, based in San Francisco, was indeed operating vaudeville houses in California during that period. Perhaps they had some sort of arrangement with the Orpheum circuit to present Orpheum vaudeville and use the Orpheum name.

In any case, the Liberty was taken over by Jensen and Von Herberg by 1917, and was operated in later years by the Evergreen-Hamrick combine, and then by John Hamrick Theatres. Hamrick had the house extensively remodeled in 1952.

From Boxoffice Magazine, March 1, 1952: "The Oregon premier of 'Quo Vadis' this week also marked the reopening as a first-run house of John Hamrick's Liberty. The theatre is now known as the New Liberty."

Deborah Kerr was among the guests appearing at the opening, which was broadcast on local radio.

We can add another aka for the Liberty. Before 1935 it was called the Music Box Theatre. About three quarters of the way down this web page depicting numerous Portland Theatres is a view of Broadway south from Stark with the Liberty Theatre in the foreground, but the signage identifies it as John Hamrick's Music Box Theatre. The same page has two other photos of the building, an early one depicting it as the Orpheum and, near the bottom of the page, a 1946 photo of it as the Liberty.

The photo of the Liberty as the Music Box looks like it dates from the very late 1920s or the early 1930s. It would have to have been before 1935, when the Music Box name was moved to the former Alder Theatre.